About Katy Dickinson

Contact:

• Email: katy.dickinson at-sign gmail.com
• Company: Mentoring Standard
• Historic Office: WP668 Caboose Story

Career Summary

Since 2015, Dr. Katy Dickinson has been a jail chaplain for the Correctional Institutions Chaplaincy (CIC) in Santa Clara County, California. In 2022, she started part-time staff work as the first CIC Relief Chaplain. In 2024, she also served as CIC’s Interim Muslim Chaplain. Katy Dickinson holds a Doctor of Ministry degree from the Graduate Theological Union‘s Berkeley School of Theology (as of May 2025) with a dissertation titled “Transforming Literature of the Bible in Jail.” BST honored her with the 2025 Keith A. Russell Award for Prophetic Leadership in Community Ministry. In 2021-2022, she was a Chaplain Intern at Stanford Hospital (Clinical Pastoral Education program) and was graduated in the first cohort of GTU’s Interreligious Chaplaincy Certificate program. In 2026, she completed GTU’s Center for Islamic Studies – Certificate in Islamic Studies. Dr. Dickinson has been awarded two Interreligious Research Grants by GTU’s Madrasa-Midrasha program. She recently completed the 2025-2026 Faith Leader program for the Clinton Global Initiative.

Dr. Katy Dickinson is the Founder of Mentoring Standard and an award-winning Process Architect. She makes mentors shine. Starting in 2001, she was the designer and manager of successful corporate and governmental mentoring programs in the Americas, Africa, the Middle East, Europe, and Asia – while holding a variety of senior executive roles in the Silicon Valley. At Sun Microsystems, she created and managed the global Engineering mentoring programs for 10 years, after creating and managing the Sun Labs archiving system, the Software development life cycle process, and other large corporate infrastructure.

Dr. Katy Dickinson was the Process Architect for the first class of the U.S. State Department’s TechWomen mentoring program, after which she continued as a TechWomen mentor, as well as serving in over a dozen delegations to the Middle East, Africa, and Central Asia, 2011-2025. She is currently mentoring legacy TechWomen teams in Rwanda, Palestine, and Tunisia. In 2017, Katy Dickinson became a Certified Interfaith Speaker for the Intercultural Networks Group (she joined the ING Advisory Board in 2021).

Katy Dickinson has been an Accredited Mentor by the University of the South – School of Theology’s Education for Ministry (EfM) program since 2011. She is the EfM Coordinator for the Episcopal Diocese of El Camino Real. She was a member of the Anita Borg Institute Advisory Board for 10 years, and a lecturer for 12 years for a University of California at Berkeley – Engineering class on entrepreneurship. Katy Dickinson was part of the team that created the Notable Technical Women cards and posters in 2014.  She was a member of the Episcopal-Anglican Congo Network from 2015-2025 and is working to create a nonprofit organization to succeed that effort. She is an author, speaker, and has been a popular blogger on Katysblog since 2005.

Katy joined the Mountain View Odd Fellows lodge in 2024. She is serving as Noble Grand in the lodge’s 150th anniversary year. She also serves as the Chaplain for the California Odd Fellows Cave Degree lodge.

More: Katy’s Resume

Personal

Katy Dickinson and her husband John Plocher live in San Jose (in the South of the San Francisco Bay Area) with their son Paul D. Goodman who is an artist in ceramics, wood, and metal. Their daughter Jessica Dickinson Goodman is married to Matthew Holmes; they live with children in Virginia.  Katy spends her free time gardening and restoring WP668, a 1916 Western Pacific steel framed wooden caboose in her backyard.

All Rights Reserved. Except as indicated, KatysBlog posts and images 2002 – 2026 Copyright Katy Dickinson